F1 2010 with Direct X 11: Breathtaking screenshots

F1 2010, based on Codemasters' Ego Engine offers highly detailed racing cars, convincing race tracks as well as fantastic weather effects. Especially the rain looks very impressive. PC Games Hardware wants to share their impressions from the final game.

F1 2010 with DirectX-11-Effects (25) [Source: view picture gallery]

F1 2010: Ego-EngineAs already done in Colin McRae Dirt 2, Codemasters used their in-house renderer Ego-Engine to create F1 2010. Thanks to the full-floating-point-HDR-lighting (FP16) and ambient occlusion, post effects like motion blur as well as clean shadow- and cube-maps, F1 2010 is a true piece of eye candy - especially, when it's raining: Spraying water from the front tires bespatter the visor of our helmet. Water runs along the car like you could touch it and the tires swirl water from the track. The wet runway looks very impressive. The environment reflects itself on the wet surface and on the vehicles.

As the rain ceases, the track becomes more and more dry. When we slip into the gravel pit, the chips get stuck on our tires and disappear bit by bit as we accelerate. The ground textures are mostly often firmly defined and elaborated to the detail. The retail version officially works with Directx 9, but there is going to be a patch that will supply DirectX 11 support later.

But we already managed to enable Directx 11 using a little trick. Find the hardware config.xml in Your "My documents" directory, find the entry "directx forcedx9" and change its value into "false". Now You'll be able to launch the game with the inofficial Directx 11 mode enabled. It offers way more sophisticated graphics but You'll lose some display monitors. Another trick is to increase the count of shadow- and cube-maps to, say 9,4 Gigapixels (3.072 x 3.072). The Appearance enhances visibly.

In the gallery you can find 25 selected screen shots which have been created in Directx 11 mode and with the tweaked config-file.